What's eating the battery life of my Linux laptop? Which software component causes the most power to be consumed? These are important questions without a good answer... until now. Intel announced the PowerTOP tool, a program that collects the various pieces of information from your system and presents an overview of how well your laptop is doing in terms of power savings. A number of apps, like Firefox, Evolution and Gaim have been modified by Intel to help consume less power and hopefully these patches will be integrated to their main trees or by distros.

Even w/o the power consumption in mind, polling should be regarded as bad solution _always_, as it's also CPU consuming. You always have a trade-of with polling, between lag and cost. You don't win anything with polling.